The most powerful rocket ever, built and financed by a private company, has a near perfect tenth test flight
Liberty quite literally enlightening the world
In the tenth test orbital flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket today, the company has what appeared to be a near perfect flight.
First the Superheavy booster worked as intended, completing a new return configuration to reduce stress, completing a soft vertical splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. During the landing the company tested using backup engines instead of the normal engines to see if this would work in future situations where an engine failed. This worked.
Next, Starship reached its low orbit, intended to end over the Indian Ocean. Unlike the last two test flights, the ship functioned as planned.
Starship completed a full-duration ascent burn and achieved its planned velocity, successfully putting it on a suborbital trajectory. The first in-space objective was then completed, with eight Starlink simulators deployed in the first successful payload demonstration from Starship. The vehicle then completed the second ever in-space relight of a Raptor engine, demonstrating a key capability for future deorbit burns.
Moving into the critical reentry phase, Starship was able to gather data on the performance of its heatshield and structure as it was intentionally stressed to push the envelope on vehicle capabilities. Using its four flaps for control, the spacecraft arrived at its splashdown point in the Indian Ocean, successfully executed a landing flip, and completed the flight test with a landing burn and soft splashdown.
Some burn through damage on Starship was seen, but relatively little, despite the decision to stress the flaps and the reduce the coverage of the heat shield. The landing was on target, an even more impressive achievement.
As must be repeated over and over, this was a test flight of prototypes. The final version of both Superheavy and Starship will not be the same. The flight tested preliminary designs and capabilities, the data obtained to then be used to redesign and revise both components of the rocket.
The most significant aspect of this test flight however is its funding. This giant rocket, more powerful than anything any government or nation has ever attempted, is not only being built entirely by a private American company, SpaceX, that company is also financing its development, using the revenue from its Starlink satellite constellation.
.The government is not involved. SpaceX used freedom to do this, a concept fundamental to the United States of America. Our nation was founded on the principle that all humans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is the government’s job to facilitate those rights, not dictate what those humans could and could not do, as long as those actions hurt no one else.
SpaceX has epitomized these principles. Today’s flight reconfirmed them.
The next flight should likely follow in less than two months. It will be the final test flight of Block 2 of Starship. Later flights will test the significantly upgraded Block 3 version.
Furthermore, we should expect SpaceX to increase the pace of launches. It is no longer being blocked by red tape at the FAA, so it will move fast as soon as it is ready.
All hail freedom!
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All hail, indeed. Success with this particular test flight profile was always a matter of when, not if. So now we know when.
Which immediately raises the question of what new ground SpaceX intends to plow on test flight 11. That is likely to depend, at least in part, on detailed examination of the copious pile of data just gathered on flight 10. Improvements to the heat shield would constitute a bare minimum advance. But I would like to see another booster catch and Ship 38 actually go to a real orbit and deploy at least a handful of real Starlink V3 birds before de-orbiting, re-entering and being caught by the tower chopsticks. I would certainly understand, though, if SpaceX decides to put off an initial ship catch until the V3 booster and ship test campaign as the latter will have improved catch hardware.
The remainder of this year should see considerable additional progress at, and out of, Starbase teeing up for what should be a truly landmark year in 2026.
Some of my earliest memories are of the Mercury 7 astronauts.
I am so lucky to have been born in America, and to have lived long enough to witness, as Dick Eagleson just wrote,
“”Starbase teeing up for what should be a truly landmark year in 2026″”
Another first I appreciate is the constant live clear color video from cameras both inside and outside the crafts throughout the entire flight.
Remember the agonizing minutes of communications blackout in the past while the crafts reentered the atmosphere?
I can only say… Go SpaceX!!!…
Although I remain skeptical about the ease of starships soft landing capabilities on the moon and Mars.. ( I believe these to be the biggest challenges. It’s hard to test to destruction a few days from earth, and more so a few months, and neither have chopsticks… Yet.. ), I would bet very little against SpaceX being the company to achieve these goals, even in Musktime…
Once more… Go SpaceX, go private enterprise in space flight, ( I am not total pinko commie), and for what it is worth… I have more functional chopsticks than SpaceX this evening… Szechuan chicken for my evening meal! ;-)
Truly amazing what that African American accomplishes!! He is indeed a GENIUS!! We should all Thank God for the talents he gave Mr. Musk and the Patriotism that Mr. Musk displays! Where would we be if he had not bought Twitter and opened the TRUTH FLOW?? I’m sure this wouldn’t have been the 10th launch had the DEMOcrats stolen another election!
I was concerned at the amount of apparent outgassing from the stern after shutdown, I thought something must be leaking or there was a fire in the skirt or something, but nothing got called out, and it obviously didn’t cause any problems. Perhaps they were just purging the area after shutdown. It will be interesting to see if that’s an ongoing thing. The amount of vibration in the satellite dispenser was also interesting, I suspect they’ll be making improvements there.
The color on return–SLS camouflage?
Pretty impressive to slowly land a massive prototype space vehicle, one that was being aerodynamically stressed-tested no less, within a few hundred meters of a buoy in the ocean, half a world away from the launch point.
Landing on the moon will probably be a bit more straightforward. No plasma, no fins, no tiles. A walk in the park!
That was terrific. The NSF YouTube broadcast I watched was excellent. The final shot from the buoy cam, very cool. Would be neat to have the buoy cam tracking Starship from the first moment it appears in the sky.
The entire human race is indeed lucky to have produced such as Elon.
Robert,
Thank you for being clear that this is a development test and that the final operational version is different from this one and is still down the road. There were several failures during this test, but I noticed that most people I have talked to about it seem to think that just because it landed successfully, it must have been a complete success. They have found some more information about the limits of the design, and they have found several areas to improve. Most likely, they have found much more information about thermal protection materials and methods than they knew before.
Scott Manley has a recap, where I watched the payload door opening, because I missed it during the live broadcast; we were too fascinated with the mist in the payload bay to keep our eyes on the door. He also discusses a few other results that we saw during the test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZw2vyZNz5I (1/2 hour)
_____________
David Eastman,
You wrote: “I was concerned at the amount of apparent outgassing from the stern after shutdown, I thought something must be leaking or there was a fire in the skirt or something, but nothing got called out, and it obviously didn’t cause any problems.”
Is it possible that this is venting from the tanks? It may also have been attitude control thrusters.
Things like this will never get old: https://youtube.com/shorts/Jltznfom29M?si=AP2PiK9GverwosHi
I am still a bit worried about any softening of the steel.
Two developments I hope SpaceX takes a look at:
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-effective-method-high-entropy-alloy.html
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-spacecraft-boost-origami-patterns.html
What I would like to see is some kind of Zylon HIAD aeroshell with some coatings and unfurled around Starship so it takes the abuse and not the hull. Origami would allow it to deploy.
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